Alan E. Nourse - The Fourth Horseman (40 page)

Harry Slencik frowned. "Like how, exactly?"

"Falling water is energy," Potter said. He pointed to the creek. "See that pool out there? See that big rock at the edge with the water running over it and dropping into the next pool? Go stick your hand in the stream down below that rock. Go ahead, try it."

Harry walked over to the creek and reached down below the rock. The water struck his outstretched palm, spreading his fingers and splashing all over.

"Feel it push?" Potter said. "That water's heavy, and when it's running downhill naturally like that, you can use the weight. Listen to me: I can build you a ramjet pump on this creek that won't take any outside power whatever to run, just the energy of the falling water. No electricity, no gasoline— ever. It'll deliver enough to irrigate your sixty acres till your back teeth are floating, push water uphill if you want, put it exactly where you want it when you want it, and never cost a penny. I can engineer a whole system of pipes and valves and ditches for you, and then I can maintain it, so you've always got water—including all the household water you can use. And I can build it so it won't ever freeze up, too."

Harry stared at the man for a long while. "You never told me your line of work, Dan."

"Engineering," Dan Potter said. "Hydraulic engineering. I can't make dandelions grow, but I can sure build water systems, and when I build 'em, they
work.
You want references, you're out of luck, but I can
show
you what I can do quick enough."

"And you could build that kind of a system here?"

"No sweat."

"I suppose you'd need a lot of materials."

"A little plastic pipe. Some two-by-sixes. Couple of hardware-store valves. A good set of tools to work with. Beyond that, I could improvise a whole lot of it." Potter checked his dinner, decided it was ready to eat. His wife was getting out plates and cups. "Of course, you might just want to take your chances with those gas generators."

Harry set his hat squarely on his head and sat down on a rock. "Go ahead and eat," he said. "Maybe when you finish we can drive up to the place and talk a little bit."

50

For Frank Barrington the trip back from Laramie to Fort Collins was long, miserable and gray—as gray as the desolated place he had left behind him. The old Jeep was leaking oil badly, so he had to stop every sixty miles or so to fill up the crankcase, and as he drove south into Colorado he had hit a cold November drizzle that wouldn't stop. For having been away for just seven days, he was missing Monique achingly, not even a single phone contact in all that time, with the Laramie telephone system a hopeless tangle—one whole solid day wasted just trying to get a single call through to CDC in Atlanta, for God's sake—and through it all, the nagging fear that the devastation that had taken him to Laramie in the first place might have moved south to Fort Collins before he got back. The whole trip to Laramie had been Roger Salmon's idea, and a good enough idea, too—that he and a few already up there might somehow draw a line and break the onrushing wave. It hadn't worked, of course, the wave had moved too fast and far for any line to hold. A week of hard, horrid work and nothing to show. . . .

The drizzle turned to downpour as he finally hit the outskirts of Fort Collins. He drove straight to Barnaby's Grill, left the Jeep in ankle-deep mud in the parking lot out back, and leaned into the rain to get inside. It was almost nine
p.m
., but Monique wasn't there yet; he took the booth they especially liked in the rear corner, brushed the rain out of his hair and settled back to wait.

When she finally came in she looked absolutely awful—gray-faced, bone tired, her eyes dull. She leaned across the booth to kiss him and he caught the inevitable whiff of lab disinfectant that she couldn't ever seem to scrub off anymore. "God, it's good to see you," she said, collapsing in the booth across from him. "It seems like six months."

"I know." He frowned in alarm. There were lines of weariness around her eyes and mouth, all signs of the old familiar sparkle gone. "What's been happening?" he said. "You look like you've been whipped."

"You're not so far off." A shrug of one shoulder, just a tired hint of the old, wry smile. Drinks came and she put down half her Scotch and water neat. "This is getting to be the only good part of the day, anymore." She looked up then. "So how was Laramie?"

"Dead on its feet," Frank said. "I might just as well have stayed here. The ranchers all are boarded up on their ranches eating their cows, and the people in'the town are dead or dying fast. The ones that can still move are packing out any way they can. Don't ask me where they're going.
They
sure don't know, and there's an awful lot of that country with nothing in it."

Monique shrugged. "At least you helped some, maybe."

"Precious little. There was nothing we could do. Not enough vaccine to cover the medical workers, much less anybody else, and the 3147 we were promised there never turned up. When I finally got through to Ted Bettendorf in Atlanta, he figured that hell was likely to freeze before
anything
got to Laramie, including any more manpower to help. Everything available is going to the big cities. Tough luck, Laramie."

"Oh, God." Monique shook her head. "Where's the man's head? Atlanta is doing everything just exactly backwards. They're going to lose the cities anyway, they already
know
that, there's not one thing on God's earth they can do for the cities— and they still keep dumping everything they've got into the cities. It's the Laramies and Fort Collinses and all the other little isolated places where they could really help if they only would—"

"It's not Ted's fault," Frank said. "He tries to be even-handed, but the pressure is impossible. All he can do, in the end, is what the administration tells him to do, the best he knows how. The administration sets the policies, and the pressure all comes from the cities."

"Pressure from whom?" Monique's voice was bitter. "From dead people? And what administration policies? The administration doesn't have any policies. The administration is quietly disintegrating, that's what the administration is doing. Frank, CDC should be making its own policies and telling the administration to go chase itself—but it's not. Ted should have grabbed the rudder months ago, but he's just dithering." She sighed. "You don't know what a mess it is, out there. Listen, a month ago I needed emergency authorization to break some very secret codes we have sequestered in the vaults here at the lab—some top-secret biological warfare codes—to get some data I needed desperately to do some gene-splicing work on a new vaccine. Well, those codes are potentially very dangerous. You don't break them unless you have to have them, and they aren't supposed to be broken without specific written authorization from the Joint Chiefs of Staff countersigned by the President himself. So I wired my request and justification to Ted

Bettendorf in Atlanta on a crash-emergency-must-do-now basis, and he got it onto the Telex to Washington within minutes with his must-approve authorization—and do you know what happened? It sat on some bureaucrat's desk for three solid weeks without so much as an acknowledgement despite three-times-a-day telephone calls for immediate action, and when Ted finally bludgeoned his way through to the President personally, all the President could do was moan and wring his hands about the terrible things that were happening in Pittsburgh, and demand that Ted do something to get some extra drug shipments out there. It seemed that some minor functionary in HHS hadn't assigned my request sufficient priority to get it anywhere near the Joint Chiefs, to say nothing of the President, so there it sat on the bottom of the pile on some desk in Washington."

"And you're still
waiting?"

"Don't be ridiculous. I gave them four days, and when I didn't have an answer by then I broke the codes without authority and started work. I daresay they could put me in jail if they wanted to, but I don't think that they're going to put me in jail. They need the vaccine.'' She looked up as Barnaby brought the steaks and potatoes. "Not that breaking the code did me any good. The gene-splicing technique isn't working. These are weird bacteria. I'm getting a vaccine, but it's taking six weeks or more to build up a veiy low level of immunity."

"In other words . . ."

"Forget it. It was a good try, but it's not going to solve any problem whatsoever. We need a vaccine that works
fast,
and we haven't got one. Right now I'm just playing around, trying DNA recombinations in old strains of
Yersinia,
but I haven't even got the
antigens
identified." She fluttered her hands. "I don't really even know what I'm doing. Nothing is working, not even things I'm absolutely sure
have
to work according to all the experience I've ever had. I don't even know why I'm hanging around anymore. Maybe we should just get out of here. Go find a ranch somewhere with some good strong fences and some cows to eat."

Frank took a bite of his steak. "Funny you should mention that," he said thoughtfully. "I had a visitor yesterday. A man Hew all the way from San Francisco out to Laramie, of all places, just to talk to me. He didn
't
say how he knew I was in Laramie, but he did. And he came to make me an offer I almost can't refuse."

Monique put her fork down. "A job offer?"

"Right."

"What man was this?"

"An old friend of mine, used to be in the Forest Service. Name of Shel Siegler. Deschutes National Forest, working out of Bend, Oregon, when I talked with him last summer—just after Pam went. Only he's not working for the Forest Service anymore, not by a long way. A very sharp fellow, Shel, the sort of guy who always ends up on top. Quite a joker, too, but yesterday he wasn't joking."

"Who is he working for now?"

Frank looked at her. "For Lord Chauncey Sparrow, once and future King of Mendocino County, California, and all points north, south and east that he thinks he can lay his hands on."

"Oh, Frank. Good Lord."

"Listen, kid, Shel had a very well-thought-out, legitimate proposal to make. They've got almost a thousand people up there, dug into the mountains and armed like Cuba. They've got four years' worth of food and water and ammo, and lots of plans for expansion, along with quite a few delusions of grandeur. They want an epidemiologist who knows the wilderness, knows how to move around in the bush, travel cross-country, high country, any kind of country. They want somebody with plague experience—somebody who knows what to look out for, to spot trouble
coming
and warn them so they can stop it before it gets to them. Shel thinks I'm the man for the job. He wants me to come out there and look the scene over, see what I think of it."

Monique's eyes were huge with horror. "Frank, those people are crazy. I mean
crazy."

"Of course they are."

"When they get hit with it—and they will surely get hit— they'll go down just like Laramie did."

"Of course they will." Frank took another bite of steak.

"So what are you
talking
about? Honey, if you're ass enough to go out there and 'look the scene over,' as you put it, you'll never come back. They won't let you."

"Of course they won't," Frank said. "Matter of fact, in order to present me with a convincing argument to induce me to take the job, Shel was forced to tell me a whole lot of things that would make it politically inconvenient—to them—for me to refuse their offer. If I do, it will unfortunately become necessary for them to shut me up. Just quietly shoot me. Some sort of bizarre accident. To get down to specifics, I now have about twenty-four hours left in which to say yes."

"Frank, you
can't
go out there and leave me here—"

"No chance of that, kid." Frank gave a harsh laugh. "I couldn't do that even if I'd consider it, which I wouldn't. Fact is, you are very much a part of their bargain. These people are
organized.
They want a vaccine, and they want an effective antibiotic. They've checked you out from top to bottom, honey. You've been on their grab list for quite some time. They'll provide you with a fully equipped lab, better than the one you've got right here, dug down deep into a mountainside and secure as a tomb. You just give them your list of specifications, and (lien all you have to do is go to work and make them an effective vaccine and a magic-bullet antibiotic, real fast. They feel certain that with the proper incentives, you'll find a way to come through."

"They're insane."

"Of course they are—but there's a wild sort of rationale behind it all. Right now, Lord Chauncey merely wants his group to survive the plague. Then later on he plans to end up controlling all of California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Idaho, Montana, Nevada and Arizona. The entire Iraser, Columbia, Snake and Colorado river drainages, to be specific. The Mormons can have Utah as long as they pay him icnt. But first he's got to survive. To survive, he's decided he needs both of us, badly. He has some, uh, commensurate rewards in mind for us, also."

"You mean like not shooting you, right yet."

"That's one."

Monique pushed her unfinished steak aside and sat in gloomy silence for a while. "So what are you going to tell them,